


Peeling the Onions

by Electric_Apple



Category: Farscape
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 09:58:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6901273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Electric_Apple/pseuds/Electric_Apple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The night after Mom’s funeral, John gets Olivia drunk.</p>
<p>He doesn’t mean to.  He really doesn’t.  It starts as a small glass of bourbon, just one finger each, just to take the edge of what had been a goddamned awful couple of months.  But it tastes good, liquid fire on the back of his throat, and when he finishes his first glass he pours another, topping up Olivia’s glass without really looking at it. </p>
            </blockquote>





	Peeling the Onions

The night after Mom’s funeral, John gets Olivia drunk.

He doesn’t mean to.  He really doesn’t.  It starts as a small glass of bourbon, just one finger each, just to take the edge of what had been a goddamned awful couple of months.  But it tastes good, liquid fire on the back of his throat, and when he finishes his first glass he pours another, topping up Olivia’s glass without really looking at it.  Habit.  Grad school, pilot training.  _Rude not to fill the other guy’s glass._ Lib doesn’t say a word.  Doesn’t refuse.  Just tips the glass and downs the entire contents of it with a single swallow, gasping and shuddering, trying not to retch. 

It’s hot out here on the porch, even now, with the sun fading off into the distance.  They sit quietly, not talking, because there is nothing much to say.  For so many months they have had subjects to fill the silences – chemo and treatments and doctors and options.  They are fluent in the language of cancer; of death. 

But they have buried their mother now.  It’s over.  And the language that has become their entire method of communication is no longer relevant.  They have forgotten, it seems, the words and rhythms of their lives before this, and so they sit, in silence, because they no longer know what to say to each other.  _Shouldn’t be like this, man._

Libby hasn’t slept properly in days.  Her eyes are rid-rimmed and heavy with fatigue, though she has barely moved from her bedroom since it happened.  If he hadn’t been here, he knows, she would still be curled up on her bed.  But John is – well, he’s Johnny, and she is vulnerable enough that she cannot refuse him when he asks her to join him.  He knows it.  Has played on it over the last week, to get her off that damned bed long enough to eat something.  Big brother, kid sister.  It breaks his heart to see her like this.

Susan will be okay, Susan has her family.  Frank, and Bobby, and Susie is upstairs right now, seeking comfort in the familiar ritual of her son’s bedtime preparations.  The world may have collapsed around them, but Susan still has this, the knowledge that she can hold her son and keep him safe and kiss away his hurts. 

Olivia, on the other hand, has no one.  She is their father’s baby girl, but she is also young, and angry and grieving, and the only way she knows how to express it is with raised voices and slamming doors.  And Dad doesn’t know how to handle it, not when Lib has always been the quiet one, the peacemaker, so he shouts back and she gets angrier, and so the cycle continues.

He knows what it’s like.  _Same thing, my whole damn life._   He and Dad, they are like magnets.  Turn them one way and they cannot come close to touching, turn them the other and no force on earth can tear them apart.  They spend more time in the first position than the latter; their periods of uneasy truce maintained mostly through their mother’s grace.  Now that she’s gone… _don’t go there, boy.  Not now._

He pours another shot; tops Lib up again.  The silence has become so deep that when Olivia breaks at last, it startles him so that he swallows the entire contents of his glass on reflex.  “This stuff tastes like gasoline.”

“Aviation fuel,” he corrects, with a small smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. 

She shrugs.  “Whatever.”  She holds out her glass.

It occurs to him, suddenly, that he has forgotten how young she really is: Olivia still has a college kid’s taste – and tolerance – for cheap wine and cheaper beer.  Three shots of top-grade bourbon, and she’s going to be shit-faced.  Another couple, and she’ll be puking her guts up all over Mom’s Birds of Prey.  But she’s looking at him with those big blue eyes of hers, and her voice is so tight and choked with unshed tears, and… _ah, fuck it._   He pours her a glass.  “You might want to take it easy, kiddo.”  He warns her out of duty, not any real desire to stop her.  _Whatever kills the hurt._   She isn’t young enough that he can deny her that.

She shrugs again.  “What’s it matter?”

She has a point.  Not much matters to any of them, right now.

They sit.  They watch the sunset.  He drinks, and Olivia matches him almost shot for shot.

They’ve been out here for almost two hours when Lib’s head comes up, suddenly.  “Oh Christ.”  She lurches to her feet and stumbles across to the porch railing: she barely gets her head over it before she starts to throw up in great, retching bursts that hurt him to hear.  He’s on his feet and beside her in a matter of moments, reaching to hold her hair out of her face, rubbing her back in what he hopes is a soothing gesture. 

When she’s thrown up her dinner, and most of her lunch as well, he helps her to straighten.  “C’mon, baby girl.  Let’s get you washed up.”  He should feel – bad, that he’s done this to her, even if it is by accident.  And he does, in the small part of him that can feel anything through his grief.  But the scientist in him, that part of his brain that won’t shut up, won’t quit analysing, calculates that she’s probably thrown up most of the bourbon before it’s had a chance to soak in.  _Appeasement.  If she’s not hungover tomorrow, it’s not my fault._

He gets her upstairs and into the girls’ bathroom.  Washes her face with a wet towel, leaves to get her a clean shirt.  Feels a little dizzy himself, if he’s going to be honest, and wonders momentarily if he should keep going till he too throws up. 

Susan and Bobby are in the girls’ room; the light under the door suggests that Bobby is still awake and rather than having to explain to Susie why Lib needs a new shirt and why he is the one getting it, he grabs one of his own t-shirts from his room. 

He returns to find Olivia slumped on the floor next to the tub.  He hands her the shirt and she wriggles into it – awkwardly, painfully, as though she has forgotten how to dress herself. 

He bends down to help her.  “It’s okay, Lib,” he says, because he has to say something.  “It’s going to be okay.”

She shakes her head and the tears spill down her cheeks.  “It’s not.  It can’t be.”

She’s twenty-two, too big to fit in his lap, too old to try but not yet old enough not to want to.  So he sits down beside her, the tiles cold and hard beneath him, and he gathers her in his arms and he makes her fit, this tangle of arms and legs and his too-big t-shirt.  And he holds her tightly, his kid sister, wanting to stop her hurt, wanting to keep her safe.  Her awful, racking sobs shake them both. 

The intensity of her grief exhausts her.  Sometime later – hours, minutes, neither one is sure – she comes to rest her head against his shoulder.  She mumbles something into his shirt.  “Don’t leave.”  _Don’t get dead, Johnny.  Big brother, gotta be immortal. The way Mom was supposed to be._

_Never, baby girl.  Never._   Tears, wet and hot on his cheeks.  “I’m not going to leave you, Lib.” 

“Pinky promise?” she asks, the old childhood taunt bringing a ghost of a smile to his lips.

“Pinky promise,” he confirms, reaching for her hand, hooking his little finger around hers.    “I will never leave.”  _Call on me, Lib.  Count on me.  Failed Mom, won’t fail you.  You need me, I’m there.  Simple as that._

She sighs; her breathing becomes slower, heavier.

Now would be the time to stand her up, to get her into bed.  But he doesn’t move.  He just sits there, holding her, protecting her, promising her.   

_Never leave you, Lib._

Big brother, kid sister.

_Never._  

**Author's Note:**

> I'm consolidating various fics I've written over the years under this common pseudonym.


End file.
